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Monday, April 28, 2014

Flashboys

About This Book

Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post–financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, these traders come to the realization separately but they discover one another and band together to reform the financial markets. They create an exchange in which high-frequency trading—the source of the most intractable problems—has no advantage.

The characters in Flash Boys are completely different from what one considers a typical “Wall Street guy.” Several have walked away from jobs in the financial sector that paid them millions of dollars a year. From their new vantage point they investigate the big banks, the world’s stock exchanges and high-frequency trading firms as they have never been investigated, and expose the many strange new ways that Wall Street generates profits.

This is a disturbing story, especially if you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account. But Flash Boys shows that there are people with a moral sense in an environment where they don’t get paid to have one and that are willing to go to war to fix the problems they find.